The suitors problem (aka the 37% rule, an optimal stopping algorithm) doesn’t apply to job offers unless you have to either accept or decline the offers on the spot.
Yeah the thing is typically you only have fairly short windows to accept/pass on job offers. At least here in North America, I usually wasn’t given a very long opportunity to make my choice for a given offer. Usually tops 1-2 days to say yes or no once an offer is tabled. If I lingered on it too long, they would usually go with someone else who can decide faster.
Which meant usually tops I only had 2-3 offers tops on my table at the exact same time.
By comparison usually the interview process took about a week on average, total.
And, yes, once you decline a tabled offer you are much less likely to be able to go back and get it again, from my experience.
The suitors problem, in a high flow environment where job offers come and go every day on the fly… does indeed apply quite well.
And thats what I did, I estimated I could go for about 4 months if I tightened the pursestrings, so I spent the first month and a bit gathering job offers and simply just writing everything down in a spreadsheet, and created a scoring algorithm to rank them all based on wage, benefits, bonuses, remote vs in office vs hybrid, and a bunch of other variables.
Once I felt satisfied that I had a ranking formula that “felt” right, I took the highest scoring job on that list from the first month of data, and then started actually seriously considering offers and took the first job that gave me an offer that scored higher than that highest score from prior data.
I also recommend Algorithms to Live By, haha, it’s an awesome book and I’m gonna +1 that recommendation to anyone else who reads this thread XD
I want to note that by following this process, I over doubled my wage compared to my last job, and if I had just jumped on the first half decent offer I got early on, I would have been making about 2/3rds the wage of the job I actually ended up holding out for.